Nextatlas
Nextatlas is an AI trend-forecasting and consumer-intelligence platform built on a proprietary panel of 300,000+ tracked early adopters. It benchmarks every forecast against the market and ships through a web platform, AI agents and an API. Pricing is quotation-based.
What is Nextatlas?
Nextatlas is an AI trend-forecasting and consumer-intelligence platform published by iCoolhunt S.p.A., founded in Turin in 2012 by two brothers, Luca Morena, a PhD philosopher, and Alessio Morena, a serial entrepreneur. Their stated ambition was to bring a scientific method to a field that mostly runs on opinion, and the company describes its 2013 release as the first independent AI-driven trend-forecasting platform.
The distinctive part is the raw material. Rather than reading the open web, Nextatlas follows a curated panel of 300,000+ verified early adopters whose behaviour it has tracked first-hand for a decade, across YouTube, X, Instagram, Reddit, TikTok, Tumblr, Spotify and Behance. The published figures are 6M+ concepts tracked, 40+ industries, 2.5M+ posts analysed per week, 40+ countries and 50+ languages.
The method runs in four stages: crawl millions of public posts to find industry-specific early adopters; score and validate the profiles, filtering spam, follower inflation and thin histories and re-scoring every quarter; analyse them with an unsupervised, bottom-up model so patterns emerge from the data rather than from a hypothesis; then forecast, with AI handling the short and medium term and human analysts the long term. The output is a named, dated, classified trend. Two numbers are put forward: 93% internal accuracy on six-month forecasts, and an average 30-month lead measured against the day a trend peaked on Google Trends.
Four ways in are offered: a self-service platform, bespoke research by in-house analysts, Generate (AI agents that turn a question into a sourced brief in seconds) and an API layer. Two verticals sit on top: TasteOS for food and beverage, with the Nextatlas, ChefAtlas and NextMenu engines and a proprietary 25,000+ concept food taxonomy, and Foresight, which stretches the horizon to ten years by reading institutional claims, patents and scientists.
The named client list includes Mondelez International, Barilla, Weber Shandwick, Treasury Wine Estates, Luxottica, Stellantis, Ferrero, Lavazza and Max Mara. The publisher joined Underdogs Group in 2026.
What it does
- Detect weak signals among 300,000+ verified early adopters before any search volume exists
- Forecast where a trend is heading and benchmark it against the market to tell a real shift from a fad
- Search 6M+ tracked concepts by free query or guided by industry, country, audience and timeframe, with an AI summary and thematic clusters
- Profile the audiences driving a movement by generation, values, geography and platform
- Generate a sourced trend brief in seconds with the Generate AI agents
- Forecast ingredients, dishes and product launches 12 to 24 months out with the TasteOS suite
- Feed the signal straight into your own agents and pipelines over MCP, REST or native agent tools
When to use Nextatlas / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Nextatlas is the right fit.
When to use Nextatlas
- Insight and strategy teams inside consumer brands who have to decide which category shift is worth backing, and defend that call with evidence
- Agencies and consultancies that need a point of view competitors cannot buy off the shelf, ahead of a pitch or a campaign
- Food and beverage innovation teams, where the TasteOS suite adds a 25,000-concept taxonomy, 45,000+ verified chefs and 12-24 month menu and NPD forecasting
- Buyers, merchandisers and demand planners who want assortment and buying decisions driven by rising signals rather than last quarter's sell-through
- AI and data teams building their own agents, who can pull the signal over MCP, REST or ready-made tool schemas instead of opening a dashboard
When not to use Nextatlas
- Anyone who wants to test a tool alone and quickly: there is no public price, no free plan and no free trial, and access starts with a sales demo
- Teams looking for social listening, which measures the volume of conversation already happening around a brand rather than signals forming before it
- Marketers who need brand or campaign performance measurement, which this platform does not do
- Small budgets shopping for a self-serve subscription, since pricing is scoped per seat, module and integration
- Users who need a mobile app or a non-English interface, neither of which the site offers
How to use Nextatlas
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Start at the /talk page and request a demo: there is no public self-service signup, and the walkthrough is mapped to your own category
- Agree the scope with the sales team, since pricing depends on the number of seats, the modules and the integrations you need
- Log in at /login once the account is opened, and read the dashboard, which refreshes overnight with the Trends, Insights, Facts and Mixes tied to your profile
- Run a search, either as a free query or as a guided phrase completed by industry, country, audience and timeframe
- Read the AI summary, the rising concepts and the thematic clusters the engine returns for that query
- Open the Big Picture view to see a macro-trend broken into themes, with what to watch, weekly rising signals and three years of trajectory plus forecast
- Profile the audience behind a movement by generation, values, geography and platform
- Turn any view into a sourced, shareable brief in one click to circulate it internally
- Ask Generate a question in plain language to get a sourced trend brief built by AI agents in seconds
- For machine access, authenticate with an X-API-Key header against the REST endpoints, or connect the MCP server once and call the tools from Claude, Cursor or your own agents
Pros & Cons
Pros
- A data source that is genuinely hard to replicate: a proprietary early-adopter panel that sits outside the open web and outside foundation models
- Ten years of signal history and 6M+ tracked concepts, so a trend can be read backwards as well as forwards
- Systematic, published benchmarking against Google Trends, which is rare in a field that usually asks to be taken on trust
- Output is named, dated and classified rather than qualitative, which makes it usable in a decision document
- Broad coverage: 40+ industries, 40+ countries and 50+ analysed languages, plus a continuous horizon from the next quarter to ten years
- An unusually deep food and beverage vertical, with a 25,000+ concept taxonomy and 45,000+ verified chefs
- Machine-first access through MCP, REST and ready-made agent tool schemas, so the data can run without anyone opening a dashboard
Cons
- No public pricing at all and no pricing page: you cannot size the budget before a sales conversation
- No free trial and no free plan; the terms describe only the registration service as free, not the Nextatlas service itself
- The headline accuracy figures, 93% and 30 months, are measured and published by the vendor, with no third-party audit cited
- The legal documents lag the product: the terms and the author privacy policy are version 1.2 dated 13/05/2020, and the privacy policy version 1.8 dated 12/04/2023, while Generate, TasteOS, Foresight and the API all came later
- No DPA, no formal subprocessor list, no trust page and no published SOC 2 certificate despite the footer badge, and no documented training opt-out
- The terms allow no refund and no withdrawal once an order is confirmed, cap liability at EUR 10, and place exclusive jurisdiction with the courts of Turin for business customers
- No mobile app, and the interface and documentation are English only
Pricing & Plans
There is no free plan and no free trial. Registration itself is described as free in the terms, but the Nextatlas service is a paid product and no price is published anywhere on the site: there is no pricing page, and the FAQ states that the cost depends on the seats, modules and integrations required and is scoped by the vendor after a conversation. No lowest price point or currency can therefore be reported. Access begins with a personalised demo, and the terms specify that no refund or withdrawal is available once an order has been confirmed.
- the always-on foresight workspace
- sold per seat
- price on request
- custom studies run by the in-house analyst team
- price on request
- the agentic AI service that builds sourced trend briefs on demand
- price on request
- REST
- MCP server and agent tools for embedding the signal in your own stack
- price on request
- the food and beverage vertical bundling the Nextatlas
- ChefAtlas and NextMenu engines
- price on request
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Nextatlas handles your data.
GDPR overview
GDPR compliance is claimed in as many words: the "Our AI" page states that data sits on secure EU servers, encrypted in transit and at rest, under SOC 2, GDPR and ISO/IEC standards. The privacy policy, version 1.8 dated 12/04/2023, names iCoolhunt S.p.A. as controller at via Stampatori 4, Turin, cites Regulation (EU) 2016/679 throughout, sets out the legal basis for each purpose, lists rights under Articles 15 to 21 and the right to complain to the Italian data protection authority, and says no transfer of user data outside the EU is currently planned. A DPO is designated, but the email line is left blank on the page. A separate policy covers authors of social posts, processed under legitimate interest and transferred to the United States under standard contractual clauses. No DPA, subprocessor list or trust page is published.
Who owns the data?
Under the terms and conditions, iCoolhunt S.p.A. is the exclusive owner of the site, the services, the software and the contents it produces, protected by Italian and international copyright law; "Nextatlas" and "iCoolhunt" are its trademarks. The social posts the engine retrieves stay the exclusive property of their original authors. Customers keep their own registration and profile data, with the full set of GDPR rights, while the publisher stores their registration details, profile and logs, uses their activity data, and may pass personal data to processors, to its own clients and to public authorities where the law requires it.
Reuse rights
The terms grant users a licence to use the site, the services, the contents and the software for their own stated purpose, so ordinary in-platform use needs no further permission. Content pulled from social networks is treated differently: it belongs to the people who published it, and the terms put the burden on the user to check each owner's licence before reusing it. On the publisher's side, activity data is used to run and improve the service and, per the terms, to provide services to the customer and to third parties; statistics and charts derived from it are said to be published only in aggregated, anonymous form.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
The site states that data sits on secure EU servers, encrypted in transit and at rest, under SOC 2, GDPR and ISO/IEC standards, and a "SOC 2 Type II Certified" badge appears in the footer of every page. No hosting country, data centre or cloud provider is named, and no trust page or certificate is published to substantiate the claim. The privacy policy adds that there are currently no plans to transfer user data outside the EU. The separate policy for authors of social posts says the opposite for that category of data: it is transferred outside the EU, in particular to the United States, under standard contractual clauses. One nuance worth noting: the public website itself resolves to an anycast IP address registered to Amazon and located in the United States, which describes the marketing front-end and not necessarily the platform where customer data is processed.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Nextatlas.
- Nothing about the cost is public: no price, no pricing page, no entry point, so the budget is only revealed inside a sales conversation and cannot be compared beforehand
- The contract is one-sided in places: no refund and no right of withdrawal once an order is confirmed, liability capped at EUR 10, the service supplied "as is" with no guarantee of result, and exclusive jurisdiction in the courts of Turin for business customers
- The legal paperwork is older than the product it has to cover: terms and author privacy policy at version 1.2 dated 13/05/2020, privacy policy at version 1.8 dated 12/04/2023, while Generate, TasteOS, Foresight and the API layer are all more recent
- Trust claims are asserted rather than evidenced: a "SOC 2 Type II Certified" badge and a mention of ISO/IEC standards, but no trust page, no scope, no audit date and no certificate; no DPA, no subprocessor list and no documented training opt-out either
- The privacy page announces a Data Protection Officer and then leaves the email line blank, and the registered office in the terms (Pula, Cagliari) is not the operating address given in the footer and the privacy policy (Via Stampatori 4, Turin)
- Social post authors are profiled without being asked: their data is processed under legitimate interest and transferred to the United States under standard contractual clauses, which is lawful but worth knowing if your own brand accounts are in the panel
- Forecasts invite over-confidence: 93% accuracy and a 30-month lead are the vendor's own measurements against its own benchmark, and a dated, named trend can read as certainty when it remains a projection about human behaviour
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Low for business users, moderate for developers. The platform is browser-based with nothing to install, and onboarding runs through a personalised demo rather than a self-service signup, so the first obstacle is commercial rather than technical. Once the account is open, the workspace is designed to be used without help. On the machine side, the REST API needs only an X-API-Key header and standard JSON over HTTPS with an OpenAPI 3.0 spec, the MCP server is a one-time connection, and agent tool schemas are supplied ready-made. Detailed reference documentation is not publicly accessible without an account.
Deployment
Integrations
Supported languages
Behind Nextatlas
Fundraising
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Alternatives
Tools that compete with or complement Nextatlas.
Frequently asked questions
What exactly does Nextatlas do?
How much does it cost?
Is there a free trial or a free plan?
How is this different from Google Trends or social listening?
How reliable are the accuracy claims?
Is there an API, and what does it support?
Where is the data hosted, and is the platform GDPR compliant?
Are my own usage data used to train the models?
Should you pick Nextatlas?
Nextatlas is one of the more substantiated tools in its category. The publisher is fully identified, registered and reachable, the legal documents are dated and versioned, and the product is documented across five distinct pages with quantified volumes, named endpoints, five client case studies and press references. The differentiator is real and difficult to copy: a proprietary early-adopter panel rather than the open web, paired with a benchmarking practice the company publishes rather than merely asserts.
The main obstacle is commercial. No price appears anywhere, there is no free plan and no trial, and the only route in is a sales demo, which effectively reserves the tool for organisations willing to open a procurement cycle. Read the terms before signing: no refund or withdrawal once an order is confirmed, liability capped at EUR 10, and exclusive jurisdiction in Turin for business customers.
The second reservation is documentary. The terms and the author privacy policy still carry a 2020 date, and the privacy policy a 2023 one, while Generate, TasteOS, Foresight and the API layer all arrived afterwards. A "SOC 2 Type II Certified" badge sits in the footer with no trust page, no scope and no certificate behind it, no DPA or subprocessor list is published, and the DPO's email line on the privacy page is simply left empty. The headline 93% accuracy and 30-month lead are vendor-measured.
None of this suggests an inactive product: the content is dated to the current month and the roadmap runs to 2026. It suggests a serious research company whose legal and trust documentation has not kept pace with its own product line. Ask for the pricing, the DPA and the SOC 2 report in the same conversation.
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